Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women

Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe," concluded the American writer Susan Brownmiller in her groundbreaking account of rape, Against Our Will, published in 1975

Around the world, a woman's body is still very much a battlefield and hundreds of thousands of women bear the invisible wounds of war.

subjugating opponents, what the Romans termed Vae victis (Woe to the conquered).

[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,

I realized our biggest revenge was prosecution of these people.

They were people I knew, neighbors actually, acting like animals. They killed thousands of Tutsis. The machetes they used to cut people were the same as they used to cut crops and cows, they didn't care.

Rape is as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club, or Kalashnikov.